Bill 62 - Quebec's marker for French distinctiveness

Vincent J. Curtis

20 Oct 2017

Many are the editorials and editorials posing as news articles that condemn Quebec's Bill 62 as anti-Muslim because it bans facial coverings in public places.  The hypocrisy is gag-inducing.

In the first place, facial coverings such as the niqab and burka are cultural in origin, not a component of the religion of Islam.  All Islam calls for is modesty in feminine dress.  So, the claim that a ban on facial coverings is anti-Muslim is plain false, and a product of ignorance - including ignorance by converts to Islam.

Second, French Quebec used to rank high on the list of the aggrieved, and English Canada accepted Bill 101, the Charter of the French language in Quebec, on the grounds that the French fact in Quebec needed such protection.  Now, in a conflict between two aggrieved parties, Islam seems to prevail in the progressive mind-set against any other competitor for some reason, including over feminism.

The intellectual contradictions of the progressive mindset are played upon below, in which I accuse a newspaper editor of the progressive crimes of insensitivity and intersectionality - to say nothing of the obviousness and tediousness of the argument offered in the editorial.  The progressively aggrieved are compared, and in this case, the palm of victory is awarded to Quebec with characteristically progressive arguments.

RE:  Call Bill 62 what it is – bigotry

Oh, the insensitivity!  Oh, the intersectionality!  Oh, the tediousness!

The editorial in question is an example of Anglo-Saxon insensitivity and anti-French bigotry.  The Spectator editors seem not to know that Quebec regards itself as a distinct society – distinct, that is, from the rest of English Canada and English North America.  Quebec regards itself as the heart and soul of the French Fact in Canada.

As such, Quebec looks to Paris for guidance in cultural matters, France being the center of the French Fact in the world.  France has a policy it calls “laiceté”, meaning that public life in France is to be stripped of overt religiousness, a policy the product of the French revolution.  Two years ago, France adopted a policy concerning facial coverings similar to that embodied in Bill 62, and Quebec is simply following Paris’s cultural lead in that respect.

The progressive outlook from which the Spectator launched its condemnation of Bill 62 for alleged anti-Muslim bias is peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon mentality, a mentality Quebec understands quite well and rejects as culturally foreign.

Before the Spectator condemns Quebec for anti-Muslim bias, it needs to check its Anglo-Saxon intersectionality at the door.  The editorial was tedious, obvious, and entirely unimaginative.

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